The Cemetery in Barnes

by Gabriel Josipovici

  THE CEMETERY IN BARNES

  Gabriel Josipovici

  In memory of Bernard Hoepffner

  dear friend – best of translators

  ‘I am freezing. The sky is made of iron and I of stone.’

  Hölderlin to Schiller, September 1795

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  He had been living in Paris for many years

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  He had been living in Paris for many years. Longer, he used to say, than he cared to remember.

  When my first wife died, he would explain, there no longer seemed to be any reason to stay in England. So he moved to Paris and earned his living by translating.

  The beauty of a translator’s job, he would say, is that you can do it anywhere and you don’t ever need to see your employer. When a book is done you send it off and in due course you receive the remainder of your fee. Meanwhile, you have started on the next one.

  He was an old-fashioned person, still put on a jacket and tie to sit down to work, and a coat and hat when he went out. Even at the height of the Parisian summer he never ventured out without his hat. At my age, he would say, it’s too late to change. Besides, I’m a creature of habit, always was.

  He lived in a small apartment at the top of a peeling building in the rue Lucrèce, behind the Panthéon. To get to it you went through the dark, narrow rue Saint-Julien and climbed the steep flight of steps which brought you out directly opposite the building. There were, of course, other ways of getting there, but this was the one he regularly used. It was how, in his mind, his little flat was linked to the outside world.

  From his desk, if he craned, he could see the edge of the great dome of the Panthéon through the skylight. Every morning, summer and winter, he was up at six, snatched a quick look to make sure the monster was still there, shaved, dressed, made himself a light breakfast, and was sitting down to work by seven-fifteen. He kept at it till eleven, when he put on his hat and coat and descended to the world below. He stopped at the corner for a cup of coffee, did what little shopping was needed, bought a paper, then ate a sandwich with a glass of beer at a nearby café. By one-thirty he was back at his desk, where he worked till four, when he knocked off for the day.

  This was the moment he looked forward to most eagerly. He kept a supply of specially imported Ceylon Orange Pekoe long-leaf tea in a little wooden box with a red dragon stamped upon it and was very precise about heating the pot, giving the leaves a chance to expand in the warmth of its belly and, once the boiling water had been poured in, about the amount of time he let it stand. After tea, in the spring and summer, he would take a stroll through the city. Sometimes this led him down to the river, at others to the Luxembourg Gardens or even as far as the Montparnasse cemetery, once known as the Cimetière du sud, where Baudelaire is buried. If he felt particularly well or especially adventurous he would cross the river and wander up the rue du Temple and the Jewish quarter or take a bus to Pigalle and walk down the rue des Martyrs and the Boulevard de Montmartre, through the covered passages and out into the gardens of the Palais Royal, and so to the Louvre and back to the river. Occasionally, on Sundays, he would take the underground to the flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt and walk round the strange, unreal shanty town where you could buy anything from leather jackets to art deco lampshades, from enormous kitchen tables which had stood for centuries in farmhouses in the Norman countryside to the ceremonial dresses of bygone African kings, and where he had once caught sight of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears examining a large green limestone lingam.

  He was always back by seven-thirty, in time for his reservation at a nearby bistro. He ate whatever was put in front of him and paid by the month without ever questioning the bill. After supper he would return to the flat and read a little or listen to music. He had a good collection of early music and his one indulgence was occasionally adding to it – Harnoncourt and the Concentus Musicus of Vienna he particularly admired, and he would often put on their superb recording of Monteverdi’s Orfeo with the dazzling Jeanne Deroubaix as the Messenger:

  A te ne vengo, Orfeo,

  Messaggiera infelice,

  Di caso più infelice e più funesto:

  La tua bella Euridice…

  I come to you, Orpheus,

  An ill-fated bearer of tidings

  Still more ill-fated and more tragic:

  Your lovely Eurydice…

  Sometimes you also went to concerts, his wife – his second wife – would interrupt him. And he seemed to need these interruptions, was adept at incorporating them into his discourse, using them as stepping-stones to the development of his theme.

  I did, he would go on, but not often; concerts were expensive and, besides, after London, live music in Paris was nearly always a disappointment.

  We listen a lot here too, his wife would say, pointing to an array of LPs on the shelves. Friends who were spending the weekend with them, and neighbours who occasionally dropped in on them in their converted farmhouse in the Black Mountains, high up above Abergavenny, were entertained to an evening of Baroque music on their excellent hi-fi equipment. His wife, a handsome woman with a mass of red hair piled up high on her head, would hand the records to him reverently, dusting them with a special cloth as she did so, but leaving the final gestures – the laying of the record on the turntable, the setting of the mechanism in motion, the gentle lowering of the stylus, the closing of the lid – to him.

  I’m so uneducated, she would say. When I met him I thought a saraband was something you wore round your waist.

  You had other qualities, he would say, smiling.

  But an appreciation of classical music was not one of them, she would say.

  Between records he would often talk about his Paris years. After the death of his first wife what he needed most was solitude, he said. Not that he wanted to brood on what had happened, he just wanted to be alone. I suppose I took on more work than was strictly necessary, he would say, but I think I needed to feel that when one book was finished there was always another waiting for me, and then another.

  Sometimes, in the early morning in spring and summer, when the light was exceedingly gentle as it touched the rounded belly of the glazed earthenware teapot, he would be filled with a sense of extraordinary peace and well-being.

  I would never have known moments like those if I hadn’t been alone, he would say. And, in the end, you know, it’s those moments that one cherishes and remembers.

  As he strolled through the city in the late afternoons, his day’s work done, he would occasionally have fantasies of drowning, a vivid sense of startled faces on the bank or bridge above him, or perhaps on the deck of a passing boat, and then the waters would close over him and he would sink gently down, gradually shedding a knuckle perhaps, or a tightly curled up soul, lying on the sandy bottom, rocking peaceably with the current.

  He knew such feelings were neurotic, dangerous even, but he was not unduly worried, sensing that it was better to indulge them than to try and eliminate them altogether. After all, everyone has fantasies. In the one life there are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the absurdity of biographies, he would say, of novels. They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadows over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death.

  In their converted farmhouse in the Black Mountains, high up above Abergavenny, his wife – his second wife – would serve chilled white wine to friends and neighbours who dropped in to see them, making sure no glass stayed empty for long.

  You thought of al
ternative lives as you climbed the steps up from the rue Saint Julien, she would say. You thought of them as you descended.

  Steps are conducive to fantasy, he would say. Going up and down lets the mind float free. How often we run up and down the steps of our own lives, he would say. As we run up and down the scales of a piano.

  And always with his hat on, his wife would say.

  Yes, always with my hat on.

  You see, he would say, I’m a creature of habit. I belong to an older generation. I would have felt naked without my hat and tie.

  He had to explain to me that a Baroque suite was not something elaborate you served up at the end of a meal, she would say, laughing her full-throated laugh.

  You had other qualities, he would say.

  She certainly made life comfortable for him, saw to it that he had everything he wanted and was not disturbed by any of the details of daily living. He for his part looked up to her, would do nothing without her consent, wanted her to say when he was tired and ready for bed, when he was hungry and ready for a meal. All their friends commented on the sense of harmony and well-being that emanated from their home in the hills high up above Abergavenny.

  In a way he had been happy alone in his tiny Paris apartment. His desk was under the skylight and as he worked he felt the sun warm the top of his head and neck. When he poured the tea into his cup in the early morning silence it sometimes seemed to him as if all of existence was concentrated into that one event. Could anyone wish for greater happiness?

  And yet, he would say, standing in the middle of the big living room with a glass of chilled white wine in his hand, do we always know how we really feel?

  Sometimes, he said, the tediousness and unreality of the novels he was translating were too much for him. At such times it took a monumental effort to keep going till the morning break and there were even occasions when he could not face the afternoon stint. There were moments, he would say, as I sat translating those identical cardboard novels with their identical cardboard plots, when I felt as if I was choking to death.

  You worked your head off, his wife would say. No one can work the hours you did, day after day, never taking a holiday. Not with the kind of mental effort translation requires.

  I would stare at the page and it just wouldn’t make sense any more, he would say. What had seemed so easy and enjoyable at eight o’clock in the morning would come to seem intolerable a few short hours later.

  You had a great sense of responsibility, his wife would say. What translator slaves over his work as you did? What translator punishes himself as you did?

  All do, he would say. With what publishers are prepared to pay us we have no alternative.

  But they have families to support. Children to feed.

  That’s true, he would say.

  Their friends were used to these exchanges, knew that his stories of his Paris years could not be told by him alone, that he needed her interjections, which functioned more like a chorus than a genuine attempt at dialogue, for you felt that they had been repeated so often that neither of them really thought any more about what they were saying.

  Don’t misunderstand me, he would say. I liked the work. I liked the fact that I could do things in my own way, in my own home, in my own time. And I liked the sense of peace in the room as I sat at my desk under the skylight. I liked the ritual of sharpening the pencils before I started and then sweeping the shavings into the wastepaper basket, of tapping the pile of already translated sheets until the edges were smooth and clean. I liked drawing up my chair to the desk so that my legs fitted underneath, just so. I liked adjusting the lamp until it shone down on the book at which I was working and on the fresh white sheet I had pulled towards me and left the rest of the room in semi-darkness. I liked the moment when I turned my gaze upon the last sentence and found the words already there, fully formed, as I brought the pencil down on the fresh sheet.

  It was only when the meaning of what he was translating began to seep through to him, he said, that he found it difficult to go on. As long as each sentence could be seen in isolation, as a specific challenge, a unique problem, the task was not only tolerable, it was positively pleasurable. The trouble started when he began, against his will, to focus on the style and subject-matter of the novel before him.

  The same characters, he would say. The same plots. Never seen in life but recurring in novel after novel, no matter if the author was an old man or a young woman, successful or unknown, as though for everyone who picked up a pen or sat down at a typewriter life had been reduced to six characters and five plots, its infinite variety, of which the authors were no doubt perfectly aware in daily life, reduced to this, as he or she sat down at the fateful desk. At those times he would find his body rebelling against the task upon which he was engaged, as though it could not or would not be a party to it. He would have difficulty breathing and would need to get up at shorter and shorter intervals to walk about the room, splash water on his face or gaze up through the skylight at the Parisian sky.

  Sometimes, on bad days, when four hours at his desk were as much as he could take, he would wander without any sense of direction or purpose across the river and into the Eastern and Northern quarters of the city. Sometimes his feet would lead him to the northern cemetery of Père Lachaise, whose extraordinary funerary monuments, some resembling nothing so much as stone sentry boxes, and others like art nouveau fantasies, but all designed to testify to the wealth and respectability of the deceased and his or her family, never failed to soothe him. He would saunter down the long avenues and turn off into the side-alleys as the fancy took him, feeling strangely at home in this civilised necropolis. Afterwards, if it was cold, he would break his strict habits and go into a nearby bar to have a shot of whisky or a cup of hot chocolate.

  At other times he would only go as far as the Luxembourg Gardens, where he would find a quiet spot and stretch out on a bench under the trees and close his eyes. At times he would fall asleep like that, but some residue of guilt or a sense of his vulnerability would wake him with a start and he would sit up quickly, momentarily disorientated, his heart pounding. Was he on Putney Heath on a Sunday afternoon or potholing with a school party in the limestone caves of central Wales? Or had he lain down on the shingle beach in Littlehampton on a summer’s day?

  A man in a checked suit, middle-aged, grubby, eating a sandwich from a paper bag, observed him on one such occasion from a nearby bench as he woke up and opined that it was dangerous to fall asleep in the open air. The sun did funny things to one, he said. It wasn’t as far away as one might think. Give it half a chance and it’ll get you. And once it gets you, the man said, screwing his right hand up into a fist and staring down at it, it will never let you go. Never.

  He did indeed feel that day as if the sun had done something brutal to him as he slept. His hat had fallen into the dust beneath the bench and his face felt red and itchy. His heart beat in his chest under his heavy clothes with an abnormal violence and there was a strange feeling in his stomach, as though it was at once empty and bloated. But after he had washed his face at a nearby fountain, combed his hair and set his hat back on, he felt almost normal. He turned to look at the man who had spoken to him but though he was still sitting there, staring at him and bringing the sandwich regularly and mechanically to his mouth, biting and chewing, he gave no sign of recognition, did not by so much as a nod of the head acknowledge that he had addressed him a little earlier.

  Such days, though, were rare. Most of the time he stuck to his routine without a thought: rise, shave, dress, Panthéon, breakfast, work, steps, coffee, shopping, lunch, steps, work, tea, steps, supper, steps, music, Panthéon, bath, bed. He had always been a creature of habit, he said, and the years in Putney with his first wife – a quiet, gentle, methodical girl (they were both of them hardly more than children) – had reinforced his predilection for a simple and orderly existence.

  He taught me the value of order, his wife – his second wife – would say. Befor
e I met him I was all over the place. I didn’t know if I was coming or going.

  You had other qualities, he would say.

  But order was not among them. No way. Order was not among them.

  She had the trace of an accent, more pronounced on some days than on others, and her habit of using colloquialisms that were vaguely inappropriate or had long gone out of fashion suggested that she did not have a native speaker’s instinctive grasp of register. But who could fail to be moved by her statuesque presence, her long flowing robes and her fine red hair piled with such careless ease on her noble head?

  Sometimes a few of those who had come for drinks would be invited to stay for a simple lunch. While they sat looking out of the big plate-glass window, talking in low tones, he would lay the table and she would make the last adjustments to the meal before they all sat down at the fine oak dining table, one of the features of the room.

  Friends who had known him in the old days would comment on the uncanny resemblance between his two wives.

  He had simply wanted a change, he said, and the chance to let time do its healing work. That was why he had moved to Paris. And he recalled with pleasure the sensation of waking up in his attic room so close to the Panthéon, with its sloping ceiling and the skylight beneath which he had set up his desk.

  It takes solitude to make you discover the world, he would say, kneeling by the turntable in the big living room with its splendid views over the Brecon Beacons, and lowering the stylus onto the record:

  Io la Musica son, ch’ ai dolci accenti

  So far tranquillo ogni turbato core,

  Et or nobil ira et or d’amore

  Poss’infiammar le più gelate menti.

  I am Music, whose sweet tones

  Can soothe each troubled heart

  And can with noble ire or with love

  Inflame the coldest mind.